---
title: Real life: pictures are much older than writing. — Just So Stories, How the First Letter Was Writte… · tree and pragmatics
description: Real life: pictures are much older than writing. Who acts: pictures. A sentence of the lesson «Just So Stories, How the First Letter Was Written, part 1: a broken spear and a picture on birch-bark» of the books course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of every clau
---

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# Just So Stories, How the First Letter Was Written, part 1: a broken spear and a picture on birch-bark, sentence 28

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Real life: pictures are much older than writing.

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**Who acts:** pictures · **What happens:** be

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Just So Stories, How the First Letter Was Written, part 1: a broken spear and a picture on birch-bark» of the books course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (pictures), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:books:084-justso-first-letter-1-a-broken-spear.lesson:28
# text = Real life: pictures are much older than writing.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = books
# lesson = 084-justso-first-letter-1-a-broken-spear.lesson
# annotation = Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): R6-punct-agree ×1
1	Real	real	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	2	amod	_	_
2	life	life	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	dislocated	_	_
3	:	:	PUNCT	:	_	7	punct	_	_
4	pictures	picture	NOUN	NNS	Number=Plur	7	nsubj	_	_
5	are	be	AUX	VBP	Mood=Ind|Number=Plur|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	7	cop	_	_
6	much	much	ADV	RB	_	7	advmod	_	_
7	older	old	ADJ	JJR	Degree=Cmp	0	root	_	_
8	than	than	ADP	IN	_	9	case	_	_
9	writing	writing	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	7	obl	_	_
10	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	2	punct	_	Agree=R6-punct-agree|Haiku=7:punct
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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- form: statement
- act: assert
- voice: narrator
- polarity: none
- teacher: changed act=assert

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is** | present | pictures |  |  |  |  | than writing; Real life *dislocated*; old *property* | tree rules |

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One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

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**Licence: [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)**, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, `mova-school-agreed-en.conllu`) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence `school:books:084-justso-first-letter-1-a-broken-spear.lesson:28`.

**The tree:** Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): R6-punct-agree ×1. **The frames** are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (`prag`) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the [release 0.4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.4/).

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